Apple's iOS 9 now installed on two out of three compatible devices

Apple on Tuesday revealed 66 percent of compatible devices are now running iOS 9 thanks to a spike in adoption following last week's update, which brought new emoji support, Live Photos tweaks and bug fixes.

According to Apple's developer webpage, the latest iOS 9.0.2 update released last week appears to be responsible for the recent bump in adoption. The 66 percent number compares to statistics gathered in early October that pegged adoption at 57 percent.

Alongside iOS 9, a quarter of Apple device owners are still running last year's iOS 8, while earlier operating system versions accounted for another 9 percent. Apple collects its data by measuring visits to the iOS App Store.

The latest iOS 9.0.2 update introduced two core features, the first being the addition of more than 150 new emoji characters with extended support for Unicode 7.0 and 8.0 characters. Apple also augmented Live Photos with hooks into iPhone's accelerometer APIs, allowing iPhone 6s handsets to sense when they are being raised and lowered to preventing inadvertent recording. The usual bug fixes and stability improvements were also included.

iOS 9 started out strong in September as first week results showed more than 50 percent of all iPhone, iPad and iPod touch owners had installed the new operating system on their respective devices. At the time, Apple said iOS 9 exhibited the fastest adoption rates in company history.

Apple most recently pushed out the second beta version of iOS 9.2 today with changes to Safari that enable extensions while running in third-party apps.

This article summarizes the key developer-related features introduced in iOS 9.1, which runs on currently shipping iOS devices. The article also lists the documents that describe new features in more detail.

Live Photos is a feature of iOS 9 that allows users to capture and relive their favorite moments with richer context than traditional photos. When the user presses the shutter button, the Camera app captures much more content along with the regular photo, including audio and additional frames before and after the photo. When browsing through these photos, users can interact with them and play back all the captured content, making the photos come to life.

iOS 9.1 introduces APIs that allow apps to incorporate playback of Live Photos, as well as export the data for sharing. The Photos framework includes support to fetch aPHLivePhoto object from the PHImageManager object, which is used to represent all the data that comprises a Live Photo. You can use a PHLivePhotoView object (defined in the PhotosUI framework) to display the contents of a Live Photo. The PHLivePhotoView view takes care of displaying the image, handling all user interaction, and applying the visual treatments to play back the content.

You can also use PHAssetResource to access the data of a PHLivePhoto object for sharing purposes. You can request a PHLivePhoto object for an asset in the user’s photo library by using PHImageManager or UIImagePickerController. If you have a sharing extension, you can also get PHLivePhoto objects by using NSItemProvider. On the receiving side of a share, you can recreate a PHLivePhoto object from the set of files originally exported by the sender.

The data of a Live Photo is exported as a set of files in a PHAssetResource object. The set of files must be preserved as a unit when you upload them to a server. When you rebuild a PHLivePhoto with these files on the receiver side, the files are validated; loading fails if the files don’t come from the same asset.

To learn how to give users a great experience with Live Photos in your app, see Live Photos.

Support for Apple Pencil

iOS 9.1 introduces APIs that help you use coalesced and predictive touches that can be produced by Apple Pencil on supported devices. Specifically, the UITouch class includes:

i know more people who upated to 9.1 from 8.x due to the new emojis more than any other reason. So all those other 150 new features was not worth it for people just the ability to give people the middle finger drove adoption.

The difference between a minor update (e.g. 9.1) and a bug fix (e.g. 9.0.1) has absolutely nothing to do with the number of user-facing changes. Any time even one new API is added it has to be an update so that developers who take advantage of that new API can require that update as a minimum system requirement. Developers cannot set a bug fix release as their minimum. In theory, Apple could have a bug fix release that adds a dozen new apps and totally changes the UI as long as it is done with the same APIs as the previous release, whereas an update that changes one obscure API is necessary going to be labelled as an update.

i know more people who upated to 9.1 from 8.x due to the new emojis more than any other reason. So all those other 150 new features was not worth it for people just the ability to give people the middle finger drove adoption.

Funny how subjective experience can seem so overblown to the person experiencing them. Fortunately we have data on this. The update curve below shows a jump in iOS 9 installations of 2% the day iOS 9.1 came out, whereas typically 0.5 - 1% of users upgrade per day. After that tiny bump the update rate returned to its normal trajectory. So while you may think you know a lot of people who were enticed by emojis, the data shows only 1-2% of them were induced to update earlier than they otherwise would have by iOS 9.1.

The main reason I'm holding out is that I'm not sure I want to install it on the iPads 2 & 3. I've heard some say it's no worse than 8 if not better, I've heard some [likely trolls] say it makes them unusable.

The main reason I'm holding out is that I'm not sure I want to install it on the iPads 2 & 3. I've heard some say it's no worse than 8 if not better, I've heard some [likely trolls] say it makes them unusable.

Personally, if you've been able to tolerate them running iOS 8, I'd think you'd be able to tolerate them running 9...sap isn't much slower at 34 degrees than it is at 35.

The main reason I'm holding out is that I'm not sure I want to install it on the iPads 2 & 3. I've heard some say it's no worse than 8 if not better, I've heard some [likely trolls] say it makes them unusable.

Better than 8 on my iPad2. Not great but better. If I could go back in time, I would have stayed with 6.xx. May not work with some apps now, but it ran great. Hoping for an "Air3 to be announced this winter/spring.